OREGON — On a cool spring day in 2004, a chicken in Oregon pooped. Ten years later, you strap a Christmas tree to the roof of your car.

The span between that hen and your living room is filled with a decade-long process to plant, grow, harvest and ship one of 6.4 million Christmas trees reaped each year from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the Christmas tree capital of the world. The system involves hundreds of people, most of whom work for one very short and intense period of the year, every year.

Your tree has a complicated backstory, one that includes daredevil helicopter pilots, 18-hour days battling Oregon sleet and, of course, the fickle hibernation habits of squirrels.

Here is how (and where) an American Christmas tree comes to life.

In Oregon, Christmas trees outnumber humans 12 to 1.

In late August, while most Americans consider back-to-school sales and Labor Day plans, Jan Hupp deals with a staggering amount of chicken manure.

Jan is the manager at Drakes Crossing Nursery in Silverton, Oregon, which, among other things, sells 1.5 million Douglas and Noble fir seedlings each year. As a commercial nursery grower, Jan will supervise the first 18 months of the Christmas trees’ lives — their infancy, if you will — before he sells them to Christmas tree farmers.

And that 10-year process starts with chicken poop.

“It has a stench that is unfathomable,” Jan says. As the 150 trucks full of manure from chicken farms roll through the small towns of the Willamette Valley, people gag on the street.

But the tried-and-true chicken manure is the cream of the crop when it comes to fertilizing Christmas tree seedlings. The smell is worth it for the nutrients.

“I’m not a greenie-weenie,” he says, “but it’s a good, organic product.”

It's cheap — only $80 per truckload — which means Jan can buy manure at an astonishing scale. Every August, about 1,200 tons of chicken poop, which Jan describes as somewhere between Play-Doh and spaghetti sauce in texture, arrive at his nursery.

This manure soaks into the ground, then “mellows through the winter.”

In September, teams of foragers head out to the forest to search for fir cones that contain up to 500 seeds each. Some work for seed companies; others work for themselves.

Douglas fir

Noble fir

Foraging for Douglas fir cones (not pine cones, as multiple growers reminded me) is pretty simple. People collect the cones in the fall after the first good rain, when squirrels chew the cones off the trees. Teams will scout cones on the ground near healthy trees with good color and shape. They also look for caches of seeds that squirrels have stored away for the winter. (It's not totally unfair to the squirrels; Oregon State University Christmas tree specialist Chal Landgren says the animals forget the location of their stash 90% of the time.)

Collecting Noble fir seeds is a little tricker. As its name implies, the fir is large, growing up to 230 feet in the wild. The cones are too big to interest squirrels, so to get a cone, you must climb the tree.

Using tree-climbing spurs and working in teams of two, collectors scale 50 to 75 feet up the trunk, then send the enormous green cones down in five-gallon buckets.

“They’re hard and green when you pick them — you could use it to beat someone to death,” Jan says. But once the cones dry, they’re extremely fragile. “You could drop it on the ground and it would shatter.”

Finally, complex machines dry the cones and collect the seeds. They sort out the healthy seeds and remove everything but the tiny embryos that will eventually grow into seedlings.

As you can imagine from the process, Christmas tree seeds aren’t easy to come by, and they’re not cheap. They cost Jan about $100 to $125 per pound (compare that with wheat seed, which costs less than $1 per pound).

The first 1.5 years of a Christmas tree's life are spent in a nursery like Jan's. Seedlings are then transported to a plantation where they will mature for the next six to ten years.

Come May, it’s time to plant those seeds. Over the course of the next 18 months, Jan and his crew will watch over the emerging plants as their green shoots poke through the dark-brown soil. They’ll cut the roots, encouraging them to grow outward rather than downward. They’ll water them once or twice per week through the summer, lest they dehydrate and get the Christmas tree equivalent of a sunburn.

Then, the next fall, they’ll harvest them. Working quickly, they’ll get the foot-high seedlings out of the soil and into a box within minutes to prevent wind and cold from hurting the roots.

Jan’s nursery and others throughout the Willamette Valley sell these seedlings for around $0.50 apiece to Oregon farmers who will plant them in tidy rows, 5 feet by 5 feet, where they will grow for the next six to 10 years.

We only have income for 35 days a year; the rest is all expense.

If you live west of the Mississippi River, there’s a decent chance one of these Oregon trees is sitting in your living room.

Most Christmas trees don't come from Oregon, and most aren't grown as described in this article. There are dozens of species of Christmas trees that are nurtured in every state. Thirty-three million trees were sold last year in the United States, from tiny lots in Manhattan to big box stores that sell millions apiece.

A plurality, though not a majority, of those Christmas trees come from Oregon.

The Beaver State sent out 6.4 million Christmas trees in 2012; other powerhouses include North Carolina (4.2 million trees) and Michigan (1.7 million).

Oregon is the biggest producer in the country, and arguably the world. In this green and gray state, there are 45 to 50 million Christmas trees in the ground at any given time, which means Christmas trees outnumber humans 12 to 1.

It’s not just that Oregon has a the right climate to grow the trees (though it does) or that a state historically reliant on logging would continue to produce trees as products. Oregon is where the modern Christmas tree industry in America was born, thanks to a Nebraskan-born farmer named Hal Schudel.

In Hal Schudel’s 96 years on earth, he served as a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II, earned a doctorate in agricultural philosophy, raised three sons, bred champion quarter horses and Black Angus cattle. He also fundamentally changed our idea of what a Christmas tree should look like. Hal's innovation took us from the hunter-gatherer age of Christmas trees into today's massive Christmas tree agricultural complex.

In 1955, Hal had an enormous idea: Perhaps Christmas trees, like corn, wheat or soybeans, could be a crop. They could be bred selectively, attended to and fertilized, sheared each year into the perfect cone.

A tree's nooks and crannies that perfectly showcase your ornament collection didn’t happen by accident. They were designed. Like every agricultural product, Christmas trees are now selectively bred and groomed for what the consumer wants: the perfect color; needle retention to minimize vacuuming; dense, bushy branches that can hold the heaviest ornament; and perhaps most importantly, the scent that wafts gently through a home and announces the presence of Christmas.

Hal's insight became Holiday Tree Farms, which started as 300 acres and now reaches 8,500 acres, is one of the two largest Christmas tree operations in the world, trading off with McKenzie Farms, also in Oregon. Holiday Tree Farms is still held by Hal's family, and this year will ship over one million Christmas trees.

Today, 98% of Christmas trees come from farms like the one first envisioned by Hal.

When the Christmas Tree Growers of America presented its first lifetime achievement award, it went to Hal.

Now there are Christmas tree plantations like Hal’s all over the country. When you visit, you see not just this year’s trees but the trees of Christmas future, too. There are trees fresh from the nursery, bright green, fragile and spindly. There are trees that have been in the ground for a few years and look like stubby miniatures of a mature Christmas tree.

No matter the phase or size, the trees require year-round care. Caregivers must fertilize them in late winter, then plant new seedlings and remove any “red and dead” trees that didn’t make it through the winter, or that succumbed to root rot, or fell victim to one of many malaises that can kill a tree. (Only around 80% of trees will survive until harvest.) In the summertime, they are sheared with machetes. Come fall, it’s time to tag the healthy, ready trees; teams of trained crews classify them by height and quality.

The real action starts around Nov. 1. It's time for six to ten years of time and money to pay off. Come November, farmers across Oregon scramble to cash in on those Christmas tree investments.

Harvest season.

“You have to live this thing 24/7 for 35 days,” says Ken Cook, as he sits in his Estacada, Oregon, office. “We only have income for 35 days a year; the rest is all expense.”

McKenzie “Ken” Cook is the president of McKenzie Farms, which ships just under 1 million trees each year. He played college ball at Oregon State and University of San Diego, followed by a brief stint playing for the San Francisco 49ers. He was the president and CEO of three nursery companies before launching his Christmas tree career. He makes frequent football metaphors. He is 78 years old but looks like he’s in his mid-60s. He hates to lose.

“I retired in 1990 from corporate America. I decided to retire and enjoy life," says Cook. "I enjoyed life for one year before my wife suggested I go back to work.”

This harvest he is “slowing down,” though, which for Cook means working 14 hours per day instead of 18.

Ken Cook, owner of McKenzie Farms, is dwarfed by a large Noble fir tree, which will be sold for commercial use.

Ken Cook inspects the top of a Douglas fir tree on one of the farm's many acres in Estacada, Oregon.

Be cautious when people are greedy, and greedy when people are cautious.

McKenzie Farms is a vast empire that includes 265 separate farms in an 80-mile long and 40-mile wide corridor which stretches the length and distance of the Willamette Valley, from the foothills of the coastal range to the foothills of the Cascades. This means Ken and his family must allocate thousands of workers, divided into crews, plus trucks, balers, helicopters, slings and more for 265 sites.

An enormously thick “playbook” chronicles where each tree will go — which truck it will be loaded into, which crews will chainsaw it down, which retailer wants how many of what species. Trucks are constantly rolling in and out; crews are busily loading 650 to 700 trees in each truck.

Ken keeps a watchful eye over all of it.

“Business is not more than a concept, an idea, and then you blend it with people and money,” Ken says, simply. His office is plastered with maxims, inspirational paragraphs he has penned, principles which made McKenzie Farms one of the dominant forces in the industry.

“BE CAUTIOUS WHEN PEOPLE ARE GREEDY, AND GREEDY WHEN PEOPLE ARE CAUTIOUS,” one sign reads.

That cutthroat competition defines the Christmas tree industry, a market that swings widely between boom and bust.

Because Christmas tree production runs on an eight-year cycle, growers can’t react in real time to market demands — or, more bluntly, they tend to overplant when wholesale prices are high, which causes the market to crash eight years later, which then causes them to underplant, etc.

“This is the first year in some time that supply is smaller than demand,” Ken said. “If that demand was in any other business, they’d just ramp up production and meet that demand. But they can’t.”

Huge farms were able to vastly expand during and after the Christmas tree busts of the early 2010s as wholesale prices plunged due to an oversupply of trees. Up to 50% of growers in Oregon and Washington went out of business. As smaller farms went under, their land went up for sale; big operations like Ken’s scooped them up.

Others didn’t sell, but couldn’t continue caring for the trees. As you drive across Clackamas County, you can see orderly rows of abandoned trees, now wild and scraggly, growing as they see fit.

“We’ve seen [a bust] four times in the last 40 years. That’s how stupid we are,” Ken says. “Just as sure as we’re sitting here, we will overplant again, and there will be an over-harvest of Christmas trees in 2022.”

But, as Ken noted optimistically, trees will be really expensive in 2016 — a six-foot Noble fir that cost $16.75 wholesale in 2013 might be as high as $22.

And people will pay. The recession did not impact the demand for Christmas trees, for instance. Christmas trees are remarkably recession-proof. People will find that $40, even if it’s been a tough year.

In addition to price swings, there’s the unpredictability of harvesting conditions as Oregon slides from fall into winter.

“It’s extremely intense, because we’re doing our whole year in three weeks,” Holiday Tree Farms manager Jeff Larcom says. “If there’s a snowstorm and it takes down a day or two, that’s like a month in a typical business. It can be devastating, and trying to react on the fly is tough.”

Sure enough, just after Veteran’s Day this year, a strong winter storm swept through the Willamette Valley, cancelling school, knocking down trees and covering Noble Mountain — one of the largest three Christmas tree farms in Oregon — with a layer of ice that ranged from a half-inch at the office to over an inch at 1,100 feet elevation.

Everything is glazed; each individual needle sparkles. It is beautiful, and Bob Schaefer hates it.

“We’ve had an, uh, ice event here,” he apologizes in a 6:30 a.m. voicemail. He explains that there was no work on the plantation yesterday, and may not be today either.

Noble firs lay stacked in a pile, ready for twine then shipment, on Nov. 17, 2014 at McKenzie Farms in Estacada, Oregon.

Bob is the general manager — “CEO, director of operations, whatever you want to call me; I’m the Christmas tree guy” — of Noble Mountain Tree Farm, where he has steered the harvest every year since the mid-1970s.

Bob believes in Christmas trees. He speaks often of the aroma — he has been smelling it constantly since 1976, and he never tires of it.

“I love the smell. When you cut a tree and you’re handling it, you just get that smell that’s almost overpowering…” he trails off. “It’s so wonderful.”

He has worked with the flora since he was a teenager, when he would spend summers shearing wild trees. “My right bicep was 2 inches larger than my left,” he remembers. Bob can describe, in loving detail, the strengths of each tree breed, though he does not like to discuss the weaknesses. He finds nothing weak in Christmas trees.

As we toured the farm, he showed off the sights — the views of five mountains in the distance; the bronzed Christmas tree sculpture that holds the cremains of one of Noble Mountains’ founders; the white helicopter making perfect, quick loops on a steep hillside, lifting bundles of Christmas trees in its wake.

These days, helicopter harvesting is fairly typical in Oregon, at least for large farms growing on steep terrain through rainy conditions. And Noble Mountains helped pioneer it; in May 1976, they designed a helicopter sling system to get trees from fields into trucks. The process is still used today.

On a clear, freezing day, “hookers” (the term for crew members who attach tree bundles to the claw) Ricardo Ramos and Eusebio Lopez work on one of McKenzie Farms’ outposts. They zig-zag through the fields, gesturing to the helicopter pilot, then take turns hooking ropes on the chopper’s longline claw, which dangles about 40 feet.

The pilot, retired Air Force Reserve major Jeffrey Linscott, swoops up the trees, flies them 300 yards, then manually releases them into a pile, where more workers wrangle the enormous, evergreen mound. They do their best to avoid the dropping trees. This “turn” is repeated over and over again, every 26 seconds, for an hour at a time.

Eucebio Lopez, a worker at McKenzie Farms, ties a pile of freshly cut trees to a rope connected to the helicopter.

Michael Everett is in charge of training and certifying pilots for NW Helicopters. He has flown four Christmas tree harvests.

“[It's] similar to sprinting down a field, putting someone on your back, piggyback, and then dropping them off, then running back across the field,” he says.

Ken Cook estimates that it costs $1 to fly each tree, based on that 26 to 30-second time frame. But if that time stretches up to, say, 40 seconds per round trip, all of a sudden he’s spending $2 per tree. And he isn’t happy.

I have told my helicopter pilots that if they are afraid to die, I don’t want them flying for this farm.

Helicopter companies can make upwards of $800 per hour during the harvest. It is meticulous, dangerous work and they're in high demand. Without them, trees would have to be dragged through the mud, one by one. Roads would have to be cut into the fields, and would quickly become swamps in the dreary November weather. Not to mention, workers would have to clean mud off the trees.

If you aim to ship 1 million trees in four weeks, there's no better way than helicopter.

The pilots must stop every hour, though. They need to refuel, and they cannot safely maintain focus for this type of flying much longer. “Bio breaks” — simply getting out of the helicopter, stretching legs, drinking water — are crucial.

When pilot Jeffrey takes a break, Ken slaps him on the back. “This is the most dangerous work he does,” Ken says approvingly, as the helicopter heads north to help another neighbor.

Since 1977, there have been at least 20 FAA-designated “incidents” (crashes, large or small) involving the Oregon Christmas tree harvest. In 14 of the incidents, there were either zero or minor injuries, and it doesn’t appear that one farm has more than its share of incidents, though there was one fatality in 1989.

One manager says, “I have told my helicopter pilots that if they are afraid to die, I don’t want them flying for this farm."

Once trees are dropped by helicopter, a worker must quickly wrap and organize each pile of trees for sorting and shipment.

Before shipping, each tree is baled with thin nylon ropes, so that when it arrives at the Home Depot, or Walmart, or any of the thousands of smaller retail operations that dot the country, the tree’s branches will fall down into the perfect shape. Its “crown,” or highest point, will remain intact and unbroken. If it breaks, the tree is worthless.

All that remains is to transport them across the hundreds or thousands of miles between the farm and you.

The holiday season is particularly busy for truckers, Bob Schaefer says, and Christmas trees pose additional challenges. They have to be loaded and unloaded one by one; they're not packed in easily transferable pallets. Some are packed in refrigerated cars, but most simply get shaved ice on top, keeping them cool and hydrated.

Then truckers head south on Interstate 5 toward Los Angeles or San Diego. Some will turn east on Interstate 10, bound for Arizona or New Mexico.

The trucks arrive at their destinations, timed shortly before the big tree-buying weekends. Some will be snapped up the weekend after Thanksgiving — Texas, in particular, is an early market — while others sell the following week. Families that keep their trees through Twelfth Night may wait until the second week in December. Others buy according to weather conditions, or unpredictable whims.

Maybe you will pick one up. You will take it to your house, where you have cleared a space for it. You will balance it, swear at your partner when it tips over, spread the skirt, wrap the lights, water it daily.

You will decorate it according to a color scheme, or go for a joyous mishmash. You will drape icicles on it, or tinsel, carefully afix the bubblers, take pictures of your pets or your baby gazing at its mystery.

You will nestle presents underneath, gather around before you go to bed.